by Lalo Cura ’10

Everymatter is for the gods—Often when men are lying
prostrate on the black earth they raise them upright from their
misery, and often they overturn on their backs even those
whose stance was very firm. Then much misery is theirs and
a man wanders about in need of life and distraught in mind.

-Archilochus

I once knew of a man who suffered from the strangest affliction. It appears that he fell in love with his handwriting, much to his misfortune. Should you want to scoff at the veracity of this story, then I would ask you to imagine for a moment what this man himself might have felt was the truth of his situation. No doubt he would have liked to deny it, to swear to its impossibility. But the customs of fate belong to those higher wills to which we have no access. In any case, though you may not care to ponder the metaphysical cruelty thrust upon this man, his story is most interesting for it is a story of the mind against itself.

The man’s affliction first made itself known to him at his workplace. He would be writing some simple note—too brief to need an email or letter—to his secretary or a senior partner, sometimes just to someone talking on the phone. As soon as he began to write, however, something took place in which he seemed to lose himself in the act. He could not understand it. There was something mesmerizing about the way the ink laid itself onto the paper. He would write continuously—it was the ink that flowed forth without interruption, not the words whose shapes were only a pretext for the rhythm of the pen’s movement. He could scarcely pay attention to the content of his message without falling behind the steady march of black onto white, like a river bank trying to form itself in the wake of the water’s flow.

The first time this happened, he was startled out of the trance only after having written for a considerable amount of time, finding that his out-to-lunch note was nearing seven pages in length. Such a moment understandably frightened him though he could hardly grasp what had even happened. But over the comings days and weeks he quickly realized that something was not right. It was not just the inexplicable trances of writing that unnerved him. He was developing a deep fascination with composition in long hand and it fueled bewildering desires in him whose scope was not like anything he had known or believed possible. But it was an aching nonetheless. He constantly caught himself longing to press pen against paper. And though there could be no rational motivation for such work, he began to spot the trappings of this peculiar obsession everywhere, whether it was the stacks of blank white paper that  accumulated mysteriously at the edges of his desk or the pen he constantly found himself fingering with one hand, along with others gradually lining his pockets and drawers. Sometimes he would slip out in the middle of a meeting under the pretense of needing to use the restroom, but actually he would steal away to his office to grab a slip of paper and fill it with frantic writing before coming back, even though he usually really did need to go to the restroom, and so suffered doubly from the ordeal.

The man was becoming increasingly disturbed by these conditions apparently thrust on him from nowhere, but you can hopefully appreciate the absolute lack of ideas of how to respond to the situation that occurred in his mind. For he was a normal person like you or me. He had a job, he had a wife and a daughter whom he loved more than his life itself, and there was nothing all that unique about him. At least this what he told himself in the onset of his condition. Like a mantra, he repeatedly told himself he was not unique, not different, for that was the only way to comprehend such fears as he had. But whenever he tried to ignore the desire to write or actively prevent it—even going so far as to throw away all the pens from his office and put all blank paper in the copy machine down the hall—his guts ground together even more painfully, and his self-avowed normalness rang hollow. At such times his apparent need to write would ruin any chance of being able to focus on work, and he could barely even hold a conversation without his gaze drifting to some blank wall or to his secretary’s immaculate white blouse which he imagined covering in black scribbles and shapes. When his desire was at its worst, he feared that there would be no white space left on Earth unadorned with his black figures if it were up to him.

So when the man finally decided to partially indulge this perverse affliction lest it consume him, he did so very nervously and cautiously, in the manner most appropriate for someone suddenly willing to barter with rationality for a chance at sanity. In doing so, he decided that it might be better to give his new-found proclivity for the written word a carefully specified domain in his life, without either ignoring it or giving it any undue attention. But, alas, he could not deny the rapturous indulgence he felt every time he gave his writing-desire its allotted share of attention, and this undeniable enjoyment soured much of what had previously seemed an appealing sense of objectivity and clear-headedness. In other words, he could never shake the feeling of having given into something, though he remained committed to the idea that he was the authority in the situation.

Nonetheless the poor man managed to stymie the growth of his obsession, and he kept it from interfering with his life on the whole, save his mind’s inner life, where it occupied an increasing portion. Suffice it to say that he tried to regard the whole issue as a secret hobby that, dormant until now, had awoken in him with vigorous demands for the attention it had previously missed and which, once provided, would allow it to resume its proper and innocuous place. He thus remained determined to treat it this way. But for how long can the mind tell itself to itself? So he started buying high quality paper from a stationery store, both plain white and an assortment of monogrammed pads and letterheads. He stopped using his computer calendar and instead carried an appointment book in which he found he could practice containing his writing.

The man’s most profoundly important purchase in this period, however, was his pen. Few can say they belong to the elite community for whom finely crafted writing instruments mean something. But the man, whether his membership owed to conditions of madness, experienced the deep delight of possessing a pen of such a high quality along with the critical capacities to know it. At a well-known store selling hand crafted Swiss pens, he had scarcely looked over two of them before he saw the one he knew was to be his. A beautiful black fountain pen with a rhodium-plated 14K gold nib, highly polished platinum clip and fittings, and an elegant pattern of four laser-engraved tannish lines running down its black lacquer barrel. In no time he purchased it, registered it, and took it home, where he immediately seized the nearest piece of fine blank paper and, inspecting his new mistress once more in the light, wrote:

Here writes the first words of my pen, Hypatia.

And just below this he signed his full name so exquisitely and fittingly that he fleetingly regretted not having been given a longer name. He sat back, admiring the inscription next to which he laid the pen down, though he didn’t have the faintest idea where the words or the pen’s name came from in his mind.

For the next few months, with Hypatia constantly at his side, the man enjoyed a period of happiness. His desire to write and the passion it sometimes involved had not lessened any but he felt he could now contain it, or at least channel it. At the office he began to do some of his work in long hand which at first his secretary and some of the senior partners discouraged though they soon found that his work was more meticulous and comprehensive this way. They made no fuss. At home the man also spent increasingly more time writing. He told his wife that he had decided to finally tinker with a novel he wanted to write in his spare time, an idea he had had since law school and which his wife admired and had always hoped he would carry out. In truth, he had no idea what to write about, and even less idea about the origins of what he really did write in all those hours he spent with Hypatia in his study at night. But nonetheless, for the time being the man felt happy and increasingly confident that things were as he had imagined them to be.

Sadly, this was not the case for the poor man, for the darker side of his affliction had yet to fully emerge, though he had begun to miss signs that it was already loosening itself from his control. When he did notice, it was at his firm, where his colleagues expressed some concern about some of the work he had submitted in longhand. Though the complaints were not specific, he feared that they were not about the quality of his work but something more fundamental and ominous. It seemed to him that either his discipline had gone lax or his illness had progressed. In either case, the scent of something uncontrollable in his writing again sent frightening signals his way. On looking at some of the documents he had done he quickly realized that his basic coherence often disintegrated over the course of the page and its meaning tended uneasily towards dilapidation. His fear pointed to something he had tried so hard to disprove. Still, he acted quickly to rectify the threat to his work and switched all of his writing over to the computer again, even relegating his personal planner practice to his free time and only copying its content from his laptop. But he also knew this meant that he would have to increase his already large share of at-home writing. Though he reasoned that if that was what he had to do to keep the frontlines of his inner crisis from extending outward, then that was what he would do. He just hoped he could keep it from affecting his family life, whose integrity he placed above his own happiness.

The man was confounded by woes beyond remedy. He would look in the mirror and see age around his eyes and in the lines across his face, age in his soul. Even if others could not see what he saw, he knew it was there. And he knew that you can count the wrinkles on a face the same way it is said that you can measure a tree’s age by the number of rings in its trunk. But trees are without either worry or wisdom, which both advance secret years upon a person.

The man’s young daughter, however, had noticed her dad’s new-found affinity for pens and, having mistaken it for something like the innocuous hobbies and preoccupations that gradually adorn adult life but which are, however, controllable and voluntary—decided to give her dad a pen she decorated at school as an anniversary present. For the first time, the man realized that his formerly private crisis and confounding affliction had become visible to others. This aroused in him a distinct degree of uneasiness and led him to further consider the possibility of needing to reach out for help, though he was worried that such an act would irreparably damage the claim to sanity that the gesture itself would be intended to rescue.

Nonetheless, the man was of course very touched by his daughter’s gift even as it sent ripples of fear through his limbs. That night he even proceeded to use the gifted pen to try to articulate, on paper, his problem for the first time. And in the act he felt a touch of warmth for having made even a slight step toward asking for help. This letter, however, and the many others it led to, were themselves afflicted by the curse they tried to name, getting lost in their own writing and failing to communicate anything. In short, the attempt was disastrous. The letters were riddled with misspelled words, incoherence, and a worrying lack of grammatical recognizability. The writing itself began to veer wildly around the page, and the mass of sheets before him, littered with pretty scribbles and the hieroglyphs of madness, represented an undeniable milestone in the degradation of his written capacity for communication. Despair and anguish descended on him. The pen given by his daughter, a standard red ballpoint with glitter sparkles and colored pipe cleaners glued to its cap, began to taunt him. Nor could its tyrannical inadequacies escape his now highly developed critical understanding of the merits of various writing instruments. In his pocket he could feel Hypatia seethe with indignity in her soft cloth travel case. He threw the wicked gift aside angrily and, turning to a new stack of blank paper, unscrewed Hypatia’s cap and proceeded to write a new letter, this time addressed to his daughter. For two hours he struggled to articulate a lesson on the importance of gift-giving within the framework of familial relations. He tried to contain it in some larger life lesson so that he would not merely be playing to his frustration. But every letter’s message gradually withered away, leaving his true anger over the wretched pen lying naked on the page, all while Hypatia’s movements orchestrated the rhythm of his frustration. It was only after some twenty drafts had been rejected and after three calls for dinner had gone distinctly unanswered that he suddenly recoiled from the whole sinister operation and veritably broke down into fear and shame and helpless remorse. The last sentence of a particular page before him, itself roughly parabola-shaped, glared at him like a wicked and toothless jack-o-lantern’s smile: It is hard to understand the wiles of this cold world, my dear daughter Julia, but you cannot pretend that it will be any easier on you in life if you continually refuse to seek help from those institutionally most well-disposed to provide it: your family.

Had such a moment, for some unimaginable reason, not been enough for the man to seek help—which it certainly was—then what followed would in any case have guaranteed it. For not long after the man’s breakdown in front of all those awful letters, his wife came into the study carrying a box of his last month’s writings, and she looked deeply worried.

We need to talk, she told him. I’m worried about you. The man said nothing and just lowered his head down onto his hands on the desk in front of him.

Honey, I just want to know if you’re alright. I looked at your novel. Is this a joke? You have probably a thousand pages here, but it’s… frightening.

What do they say? the man said, looking up now. He was genuinely curious, you see, because he actually had no idea what he had been writing all these past months.

So his wife read some of it to him from the first few pages of the box. It was crazed and incomprehensible but also somehow severely eerie in its tone. She read several lines in particular to him:

The white bones that won’t bite but chomp and grind each other will not stop the bleaching souring, do not trust the white chomp, grind for it will not cure the bruxism in your soul, save only the night’s dark day when will white it cover out.

The man sat frozen. He had no idea that he could have produced such words, and something sinister in them deeply frightened him. She read another line:

As it is written, so shall it be done. For if you would not write it, then you would just as well try speaking with your ass for all the justice it will bring you in this world.

And another line, a few pages down:

Only in time will all the blank spaces in the world, so offensive in their lack of determination, be judged and sentenced to meaning. But until that time you must learn to conquer them still—circumscribe such spaces with characters and words. Let no space be uncontained by the figures that subjugate their meaning, just as each letter contains spaces though these spaces belong to the letter.

She stopped reading as her eyes began to water, though she remained silent. She put the box on the desk so that he could see the pages himself. At this point, I scarcely need to repeat what the general character of these writings was. On one page, titled “Transcendental Dietetics,” he had drawn a series of pill-shaped objects—it was a catalogue of vitamins—and next to each one he gave a name, a description of its properties, and an explanation of its importance for his well being. And not many pages below this, there was a binder-clipped mass of several hundred pages that described in relentless detail various biological processes occurring in the human body. These descriptions were complete with editorial comments on how to finish this project—the complete transcription of the body’s functioning into words—which alone would guarantee his physiological continuity, the notes suggested.

The man moved the box of papers away and closed his eyes. He was at last broken by his condition.

Honey, I need help, he said.

Now, I’m no philosopher. But I should say that although it is difficult to imagine this man’s hardships, I believe it is important to realize something deep beneath his story whose roots extend all the way down to the most fundamental questions that plague the universe. For the world is full of dire questions. There are more questions about what is than what actually is. And so most of us, especially after the last vestiges of childhood have gradually abandoned us, do not care to answer all these questions or even a great many of them. Nor do many find it worthwhile to search out such questions. But make no mistake—some questions find you. And when one does, as happened to this poor man, it will claim you entire, so that no aspect of your life will remain untouched by what it asks of you.

But, many months later the man was again living a relatively normal, happy life. He had gone through some counseling and had been able to give up writing by hand altogether. Nor did he suffer any longer from those ravenous episodes when the need to write would consume him. As for Hypatia, he knew she was a jealous mistress, and wary of destroying her, mailed the pen as a gift to his cousin in El Paso where it was sure to be lost to the world forever among the junk he hoarded. He even secretly blamed Hypatia for his condition, thinking she had orchestrated the whole thing even before he ever entered the pen store. And at work he was able to function just as he had before. He even found dictating his work to his secretary comforting in a way totally opposite to the rapturous frenzy inspired by long hand. Everything at last appeared settled, and was so for the next few years.

But one day, sometime later, when the man was at home alone he received an urgent phone call. It was the hospital. His daughter had been in a car wreck. His heart went numb, and he frantically began asking if she was alright. He was in the middle of saying that he was leaving right away to get there when the woman on the other end cut him off:

Sir, she is going to be alright, but she needs a blood transfusion, and I need you to contact your insurance company right now and have them send over some specific information from her medical records right away so that we can make sure she gets the best treatment as fast as possible.

Of course, I—

Sir, this has to be done right now, so please listen carefully and I’m going to give you something to write down. The man’s heart sank and fears flushed inside him.

Alright, are you ready to write this down? the nurse said. He was silent, and his lips fumbled wordlessly.

Sir, are you there? This is very serious, she said.

Yes, just let me grab a—, the man began though he choked before he could say pen. He looked around the room in panic. His laptop was in his car, and he knew it was out of battery anyway. He hadn’t touched a pen in so long, nor would he even let his wife keep blank white paper out in the open around the house anymore. Instead she used bright neon-colored paper pads which, even in the worst phase of his affliction he regarded a repulsive receptacle for the written word—but even these he could not find anywhere in sight. Worse, his wife was on a plane that moment, entirely unreachable.

It’s alright, I can remember it, just tell me, the man said, though he could barely force these words out of his mouth which, along with his thoughts, felt like they were sinking down into his quivering and uneasy stomach.

No, sir, that will not work. This is very serious, and I have to give you a hospital ID number and directory information. You cannot get it wrong. You must write this down, the nurse said sternly.

The man looked out the window in the hope that there might be some passerby whom he could enlist to help.  He would do anything for his daughter, he would jump off a bridge to prevent the least bit of harm from being done to her, but he could not stop the emotional terror inspired by the memories of his illness—all those terrible white sheets—and this made him feel indescribably horrible and ashamed. He couldn’t begin to tell the nurse about his problem—the idea of trying to describe it to her sincerely was almost as sickening as the nature of his malady itself. Then the man spotted his wife’s canvas tote bag on the kitchen counter. He knew she always kept a pad or two of his fine monogrammed stationery which he had ordered in considerable bulk and so had needed to be used somehow.

Okay, one second, I’m sorry, let me grab a piece of paper right here, the man said with choked terror. He pulled the bag over to him and dug inside it to grab the pad and the only pen he could find in it—a black ballpoint. He almost vomited at the click of the cap coming off.

Alright, I’m ready, the man said, almost whispering. He was so dizzy and terrified he thought he might faint, but he took a deep breath and closed his eyes as he began to write down what she said on the phone. When he opened his eyes again, he saw that he had written what she had said and nothing more. Nothing. A huge, cavernous feeling of nothingness came over him. He did not know whether it was a symptom of his madness or simply that his terrified expectations had not come true. But in any case, for the first time he felt he was free at last.

Epilogue

Later that week, when his daughter had already recovered almost completely and would suffer no permanent injury, the man received an unexpected letter in the mail from El Paso. Curious, the man opened it and immediately recognized that it was a thank you letter written on nice letterhead with his cousin’s monogram atop it, in long hand which was unusual for his cousin. But what he found even more unusual about the letter was that it was exactly eighteen pages long.

by Emily Fiocco ’10

The suitcase handle slipped from my hand as I whirled back toward the street. I lifted a hand to call the taxi back, to tell the driver I’d made a mistake. But the door opened behind me, and it was too late.

“Sophie!” Aunt Tara’s tongue caught on the S and spit sprayed my cheek. She reached as if to take my luggage but wobbled, losing her balance. She caught hold of the doorframe and then smiled with her lopsided grimace. “Welcome,” she said.

“Hi.” I shrugged my shoulder to my cheek to get the spit off. “I’m here.” I tried to smile, but abandoned the effort.

“Come in!” Aunt Tara said. She backed up as she opened the door and grabbed her cane from where it leaned against the steps. “How was your flight?” Her mouth twisted all the words up. Saliva gathered in a cream on her lips.

“Fine.”  I looked away. We stood in the foyer for a minute. She shrugged her good shoulder.

“Your room is ready.”  She reached for the banister.

“I know where it is.”

I walked past her and up to my bedroom. The room I always stayed in when we visited. The room I was stuck in for a month. It was dim like the rest of the house, despite the windows. The glass was smudged; it refracted the light. Aunt Tara had made up the bed. I tried not to think of the effort it must have cost her. I waited until she called, and then went downstairs for dinner. I’d planned my dinner speech the entire way over.

“I don’t want to be here. My parents didn’t ask me. I’m letting you know this right now.”

She’d ordered in fried chicken. I finished my words and crunched down hard on my drumstick. The bone splintered. I had to pull fragments out of my mouth before they impaled my tongue. I couldn’t look at her. I wanted to punch her, or the table, or slash a hole in her orange velour sofa. Anything to get sent home.

When I looked up she was just staring at me. The left side of her face looked like someone took her skin and tried to yank it to her chin. But her eyes seemed very blue. The left one was smaller. The stroke she had when she was three stunted everything on that side of her body. I had never noticed the mole beside her right eye before. I looked back down.

“So we’ll stay out of each others’ ways,” she said.

Adrenaline made my thighs numb. I pinched my skin. “Really?”

Aunt Tara nodded slowly and her good eye stayed steady.

“Fine.” I ate another chicken wing. She hadn’t made it through her first. Without a word I got up, threw the paper plate in the trash, and went upstairs. That night, it was easy to fall asleep.

I’d thought I wouldn’t be able to sleep the first night there. Instead the fear came in the morning. Even with sun seeping through the window glass warm my face, it didn’t change the fact that I was stuck with Aunt Tara. It didn’t change the reasons I was stuck, either. Didn’t change the fact that my parents had been fighting for over a year, and apparently, it wasn’t going to get better. I jerked into a ball and the Fight played out again in my mind.

Dad had started the yelling. “You’re late. You’re always late.” He’d come in late from work but there still wasn’t dinner on the table. Mom and I had eaten a late snack. She put the frozen chicken in the oven ten minutes before he got there.

“You’re late,” she told him. “You’re an hour late. And you didn’t call.”

“A call? You need a call to tell you when dinner should be?” He wrinkled his lip.

“No point cooking if you’re going to be late.”

Dad stepped forward, opened his mouth—

“Come on,” I said. I got up and stood by Mom. She didn’t look over at me. “Food’ll be soon.”

Dad swept out his arm like a Shakespearian actor but his face was all twisted. He pointed at Mom. “You say I’m late? It’s you.” He hissed the words. “You want to talk about problems. You’re the problem.”

“Dad!” I was already crying, my voice rising higher. “You’re not being fair.”

“Shut up, Sophie.” His eyes squinted, narrow and mean.

I grabbed onto the table. He moved to the door.

“I’ve had enough,” he said.

“Yeah, sure,” I said. I still don’t know where the words came from. “I’ve had enough too. You’re a fucking asshole.”

I didn’t see her hit me. Just felt the burn of my cheek. When I turned she was still standing with her arm out across her body.

“What?” I couldn’t make sentences. “You hit me? Not him? He is!”

She took a step forward. I thought she was going to apologize. “How could you?” I said, and I ran to my room.

No one came up to find me. I sat in my room while the sky grew dark and dinner time passed. There were sounds downstairs, footsteps and words. Doors opened and shut and then there was silence. In the morning, Dad wasn’t there.

“He’ll be back soon,” Mom said. She didn’t look me in the eyes. I didn’t say a word, to her or to Dad either when he came back five days later. That’s when they gave me the ticket. Told me the plan to bus me off to Aunt Tara’s down the coast.

I said I wasn’t going. “It’s not fair,” I told Mom. “Even you can’t stand her.”

“She’s my sister,” she said. Her voice was very cold. She looked me in the eye, then. I had to go.

When my mind cleared the fear came back. I thought of the way Aunt Tara had watched me last night, during the meal. How when she blinked, the eyelid on her ruined side didn’t come up all the way. She listened like a radio antenna tuned into some arcane station. Calculating.

The next morning, there was no sign of Aunt Tara. I left the house as quickly as I could—packed a bag for the day and took off without looking for her. My parents have given me a credit card for what I “needed”—and I knew there’d be a lot of things I’d “need.” But it felt strange to be in the town without them. I walked by the General Store, white and ramshackle, where we’d get the picnic lunches they made me eat with them on the beach. A few times during the week at the least. Sand got into everything. I passed the candy store and the ice cream shop and the bathing suit depot…we’d been to them all.

I stopped in front of the entrance to the main beach. I could picture the beach like I was standing on it. The white sand, blue waves, nasty little kids screaming everywhere, girls on double-sized towels in tiny bikinis, mothers in too-small swimsuits and fathers who roasted their beer bellies in the sun. If there were cute guys the whole thing would be passable, but the male population was mostly middle schoolers. I kept walking, into the heart of the beach town. The stores were the same and different—the maternity shop had turned into a wig store, the display window full of blonde and brown and even red and purple hair. The jewelry store had expanded but my favorite coffee shop next door was still in place. A new bookstore, a renovated deli. Another used clothing store. It didn’t take long to walk the three main streets of town. I went through them once, then again, and then got on the road that led out of the cutesy places, and on towards the city a few miles away.

I didn’t know how long I would have to stay in this place. They said they’d have to work things out. They said it might be a while. Might be a while, to resolve a year of fighting.

The fights started a year ago. Dad came home later and later and when he got home he’d yell about anything. During the school year it was the worst.

“Where are you going,” he asked when he found me getting ready to leave the house on a school night.

“I’m done. Going to hang out.”

“It’s a school night. Answer is no.”

“Dad—”

“Greg, I think—” Mom would start. I didn’t want her protecting me. He turned on her.

“She has to learn sometime. Work ethic. It’s important. She needs some sort of example.”

Because Mom taught flute lessons out of the house. And she wasn’t teaching many. She cried a lot in her office during the day.

“You’re not fair,” I screamed.

But I never had the guts to just leave. I just stood up and went to my room while the fight continued. I closed my door and waited it out, talking for hours with my friends on the phone. Pretending like nothing was wrong.

By the time I got to the main city my flipflops had rubbed my feet raw. Already the tops of my arms and shoulders had turned red in the sun. I welcomed the pain. There wasn’t anything interesting in the regular city. Just a mainstream bookstore. I went in and got my SAT book. That and pre-class English essays were my only activities for the summer. I stayed at the bookstore for a while with a magazine. The café was quiet and I sat at a little square table, drinking cold coffee and pretending I was from a big city. Pretending I was older than a sophomore. Imagining I had moved out and my parents had nothing to do with me anymore. I tried not to cry.

The walk back home took almost twice as long. I did most of it barefoot. It was almost dark when I got back. I sat down on Aunt Tara’s porch. There were buildings in the way of the beach but the sky seemed wide open. Before the sun fell below the buildings across the street the sky shone purple and blue and pink and gold and gulls looped, black silhouettes, through the glory. There was a creak, and then I heard stuttered footsteps.

Aunt Tara limped out onto the porch and sat down at the chair by the door. I didn’t move. We both sat, not talking, until the sky faded. Without a word she got up and went back into the house. I sat on the steps in the dark. The quiet was strange, but everything seemed soft. Muted. Or it was just my thoughts. I’d buried them on the walk and their absence surprised me. I got up, and went to my room to sleep.

She was in the kitchen the next day when I went to get breakfast.
“Good morning,” Aunt Tara said. The orange juice in her pitcher sloshed near to the sides as she brought it to the table. Two glasses already sat at the table, empty.

“I made it myself,” she said, and gestured towards the juice. Orange halves lay on the counter, twisted and mutilated, their leftover pulp spewed on the counters.

“Oh,” I said. I sat down. I poured a glass of the stringy juice and took a sip. The acid and cold hurt my teeth and I tried not to grimace. She sat next to me. She smelled all over like oranges. Orange pulp stuck to her wrists and even her useless hand.

“How is everything?” she asked.

I put the glass to my lips but then put it down. “Fine,” I said. “Busy.”

“Busy?” Aunt Tara raised the eyebrow on the good side of her face. “I thought you might get bored.”

It took me a minute to understand her speech. “Nope,” I said. “Got work to do.”

“Do you remember Benny?”

Benny. Last time we’d visited they’d made me babysit this kid because I’d complained about being bored. I hate kids. I’d let them all know that after the fact.

“No,” I said. “Not going to babysit. Not going to happen.” I got up.

“If you want it,” she said.

“I don’t.”

At the end of a parking lot on the far edge of the town, up a dune and through a hole in the fence, a private beach stretched rocky and kelp-strewn for a few hundred meters. A landscape full of dull green and brown and grey. But ugly meant empty—even the people who lived in the apartments it belonged to just went to the tourist beach.

I’d found the beach a few years ago. It took until middle school for my parents to let me go off on my own, but that first vacation I was freed, I explored everything. One day, I went through a parking lot, under a missing slat in the fence, down a dune, over some rocks and a patch of long sharp grasses. There it was. Once I found it, it was mine.

Now, it was the only place I could think of to go. I had to hop across the sand; the gravel and broken shells burned on my open blisters. I didn’t go far before I spread out my towel. Took out my books and put on a hat and figured I’d just read for the rest of the day.

Time didn’t pass as quickly as I thought it would. Even the sun distracted. Sweat popped from my pores. I put my book down and tiptoed through the shells and seaweed to the edge of the water. Waves caught my ankles, pushed up to my calves—I jumped back. When I was little I took swim lessons at the YMCA.  I never learned to open my eyes. Chlorine made them burn. Mom and Dad towed me out into the ocean, years ago. They tried to make me swim through the waves. “Open your eyes,” they said, but I was paralyzed, terrified of what swam beneath the water. I kicked and screamed and sobbed. When they let go, I sank. Finally they brought me back in to shore. I fell onto the sand, crying my heart out, feeling over and over the sensation of the wave dragging over my head, pulling me under.

The waves broke in little white spurts of foam. There was a buoy line a hundred meters out or so. No life guard at this beach. Even thinking about the deeper part got me high stepping out of the water. My ankles had turned numb. I walked back to my towel. Shells crunched under my feet and I thought I’d cry with the pain. I lay back on the towel and let my feet throb. The heat baked my skin and melded with the pain in my feet. I closed my eyes. No one was around. No one to tell me what to do. No one to shout.

Things could be worse.

Benny came to the beach the very next day. I put down my towel and just minutes later I heard scrambling behind me.  I jumped up. Sand poured into the hollow of my towel.

“Sophie?”

His face was still scabby—from eczema or heat rash, I’d never known. He looked almost the same as three years before—knobby knees, light-white hair. Invisible eyebrows. In his hand he had a little rubber duck. If it was the same one, I couldn’t tell.

“Benny. What are you doing here?” I sank back down into my sandy towel. I hadn’t realized how much my heart rate had sped up. I breathed in.

Benny shrugged. He kicked at the sand. Looked up, then down.

I sighed. “You still carrying that thing around?”

Benny looked at his duck. He thrust it in the back pocket of his swim suit. “Why haven’t you come over?”

“I’m not babysitting you this year.” I crossed my arms. He looked serious, like always. “I mean it,” I said. “I have other things to do.”

“I don’t need a babysitter. I don’t have to have one.” He jutted out his chin. I had to stop myself from laughing.

“What are you? Five? Six?”

“I’m seven!”

“Okay,” told him. I brushed sand off the towel and lay down on my side. “That’s just fine.”

He came closer. Then he sat down.

“Really, Benny?”

Benny didn’t say anything. He looked up and he didn’t even pick at his face. He pulled his knees to his chest and rested his cheek on them. His shoulders were small, thin. His spine bumped down his back and blue veins traced faint paths beneath skin.

“Alright,” I said. I sighed again.  “Just don’t bother me.”

He came the next day, and the next. I could walk down to the beach town and he’d find me there.  Anywhere I went, he appeared. My albino shadow. Then he didn’t show.

I tried to read. But I kept thinking every movement on the beach was him. I waited for him to jump out and surprise me. For him to hand me a shell and tell me it was cool, or run laughing out of the water, coming to tell me about the latest way he’d amused himself. I couldn’t concentrate. I walked around town and when I found myself looking at all the little kids for the one with the bright-white hair I shook my head and walked faster.

That day I went home early.

“Hi,” Aunt Tara said. She sat at the kitchen table. I’d gotten all the way to the sink without noticing her.

“How’d you get there?”

“How are you?” she asked. She’d left her hair down. It was thick and chestnut colored. She pushed it back with her good hand and her neck showed, slender and white. I was staring.

“Fine,” I said. I got my water.  I sat down at the table kitty-corner to her, poised to leave. She looked over and she smiled.

“It’s nice to have a friend,” she said.

My stomach lurched. I shrugged. Aunt Tara massaged the stiff skin around her mouth. “They’re good to keep around,” she said. She ran her good hand down her crippled arm to the useless hand that clenched small like a claw. I thought of my friends back home. Of my parents. My arm twitched and I almost threw the glass I held at the wall.

“I’m getting dinner,” I said. I never stayed in when she was in the house. I started walking towards the door. I stopped, and turned back around. “You want anything?”

. Aunt Tara sat still at the table. After a minute, she looked up. She smiled her half smile. “I’m fine,” she said. She pushed herself up from her chair. Took a jerky step towards the sink, then another. She had no cane. I didn’t see it anywhere . Suddenly, I was afraid.

“Bye then,” I said. I turned and ran out the door and didn’t come back again until dark.

A week went by. Same activities, different days. Benny came most days. I never asked him where he was when he wasn’t with me. But without him the beach seemed like a vacuum. I’d sit there with all my work laid out in front of me but I didn’t do any of it. I missed them. I missed having my parents around to laugh when a gull flew too close. My dad always fed them. I missed our trips. One time we’d gone whale watching. The ocean sprayed everywhere, the engine was loud. We went so far the shore disappeared and if I didn’t look back I could pretend we were going to go forever. Saltwater flew up and hit my face and I loved it, all of it, and didn’t care there were no whales, even though Dad tried to get his money back.

I knew it wasn’t like that anymore. Even if they’d been there we’d be fighting all the time. I had to remind myself of that. I left my stuff and went on walks, back and forth over the sand and then down roads around the town. I walked until the sweat ran down my back and I was so thirsty all I could think about were the fifty cent slushies, lemonade and cherry flavored, at the entrance to the main beach. And then I walked a little more before I let myself get one. I made it through another week. One thing at a time.

Then it rained.

“Good morning,” Aunt Tara said when I finally came downstairs. I’d hoped she’d be gone. She’d made another pitcher of orange juice. I aligned my elbows with the worn grain in the table and ignored her. She sat down across from me.

“Your parents called last night.”

I couldn’t move.

“You should probably call them.”

Her fingers tapped the table and the good side of her mouth began to turn up.

“What are you happy about?” I asked.

“I’m not,” Aunt Tara said. Her smile disappeared “But maybe you will be.”

I opened my mouth to yell at her but Aunt Tara stood up and walked out of the kitchen, leaning on her cane. Her yellow skirt swished like a beaded lampshade in an earthquake. She didn’t look back.

I ran out the door, crying. Ran down the streets of the town; only the bars were open. Music played through the rain—Queen and James Taylor and all the oldies and beach songs in between. I stopped under an overhang and dialed my parents.

“Hi sweetie.” Mom answered.

“You called.”

“We did.”

I tapped the cell phone on the wall, waited for her to keep talking.

“Your dad and I have been discussing some things.”

“Where is he? Where did he go?”

“He’s not here right now.”

“You mean he’s already moved out?” My voice rose high. No one was around to hear it. I squeezed my phone, fingers wrapped around it. It shook. There was a silence. “Mom!”

“Honey,” she said. “We just think it’s better if we—”

“I can’t believe you. I can’t believe this.” My throat hurt, I couldn’t speak. I tried to swallow but I gagged instead. “You’re actually. No.”

“Sophie—”

“No!” My throat went raw with the scream. I slammed the phone shut and stood shaking. Then I ran through the rain to the private beach.

My t-shirt caught on the barbs of the fence. I heard the rip and felt the sting as the barbs tore through to my skin. “Dammit!” I shouted, and shook like a dog to get the sand out of my shirt. My hair flew everywhere, un-pony-tailed and tangled, and sand sprayed from everything. Grains ground my skin under my bikini, my shorts. The rain had soaked my shirt and it clung to me, covered in gray sand.

Gulls shrieked overhead. There was a fish laid open on the sand. The birds cawed and fought as they tried for the meat. Others swooped to pick up the crabs marooned from the night before. One flew near my face and I swung at it. The bird landed and cocked its head. It hopped once, then twice, closer to me. Its white feathers glistened in the rain.

“Get,” I said. “I don’t need you.”

I walked the length of the shoreline to the apartment complex, then back again. My soles had grown tough but I pressed down hard with my heels to feel the sharp edges. Beached seaweed seeped fish smell into the wet.  I walked four laps before Benny showed up.

“What do you want?”

Benny’s eyes went wide. He came a little closer. He had the duck in his hand. With his hair plastered to his head he almost looked bald.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yup.” Tears formed in my eyes so I turned around and walked the other direction.

“You’re lying.” He hopped to get in front of me.

“You’re annoying.”

“I got an idea,” he said.

“Don’t care.” I scuffed my feet in the sand and kicked a clump of it over his shins.

“The boat. Let’s take out the boat. We can run away.”

“You’re an idiot.” I stopped, crossed my arms. Then had to uncross them to wipe away the tears that fell out when I blinked. They mixed with the rain. The rain had grown lighter, just a drizzle, just a spattering of real rain drops mixed in. Wind blew and I shivered.

“Come on,” Benny said. “Look at the boat.”

“What boat?”

He grabbed my elbow. His fingers were small and hot. He wrapped them tightly and pointed down the beach. There, half in the weeds and sand in a dune was a yellow boat. I’d seen it before but it had faded into the landscape—beyond notice long ago.

“I don’t like water. I’m not getting in. It’s raining”

“Please? Look, the rain stopped.” he said. He had the duck out and his thumb was going furiously, polishing its little yellow head.

“What’s it to you?” I wanted to be cruel. Wanted to say, get the fuck out of here, you little twerp. I hated him.

“It would be fun.” His voice was low and he’d already turned to walk away. He reached up to pick some scabs off his head. It made me want to puke and I picked up a handful of sand to throw at him. I thought of his delicate skin. Of how he sat so close when he came to visit. The way his whole forehead wrinkled up when he smiled. I dropped the sand.

“Get the boat then.”

Benny turned and ran to the boat. By the time I’d gotten there he’d pulled it from the dune. Just a little yellow pedal boat. Dirty and swampy on the inside, but intact. It was surprisingly light to pull, just bumped and slid right along behind as we took it over the slant of sand to the water. “Get in.”

It didn’t take us long to get clear of the beach. I pedaled and Benny sat up on the seat back. I didn’t realize how close we’d be to the water. The rain had become a steady stream of droplets soaking us from above. Waves slapped up on the yellow plastic and then washed over it, icy splashes on my thighs. We were almost eye level to the ocean. I swallowed down a panic. There were things beneath us. Things in the water. I pedaled faster so I didn’t scream. We got to the buoy line and then passed it. My thighs started to burn.

“We’re too far.” Benny slid off the top of the boat to the seat. The boat rocked. Dead bugs in the bottom of the boat brushed my legs. I flailed them in the air.

“Hold still!” I told him.

“Too far.”

I looked back to shore. It was close. Just a little smaller. A little grayer, through the rain. “How are we going to run away if we can still see land?”

“You didn’t say we were running away.” He took out his duck and threw it up. He caught it and did it again. And again.

“You said we were, dumbhead. And anyways, no one will care. No one will care if we disappear.”

Benny picked a scab on his face. His forehead wrinkled down in a frown. A little spot of blood bumped up on his chin where he’d been picking. Grey lights raced over the rain-pockmarked waves, water mirroring the sky. In the silence and stillness the rain and the waves hitting the boat seemed even louder. The rain pattered steadily while the waves hit with a wet thwop, then a suctioning sound. A barge moved slowly across the horizon, edges blurred by the rain.

“That isn’t true,” said Benny. He looked back towards the beach, but no one ran out to look for us. He held his duck and rubbed its head.

I took the duck. He watched me with mouth half-open but didn’t try to take it back. I ran a finger over its head, felt the smooth narrowing body. It was just a little damp and I smoothed the water over its body. When I was little I had stuffed animals I’d carry everywhere. My lucky charms. I felt the ridges imprinted in the rubber of the duck for wings, the smooth round outcropping of bill. It grew warm in my fingers and I put it to my lips. The rubber felt warm, intimate. I brushed it against my cheek then held it down in my lap. Benny stared.

“But it is,” I said. “It’s true. No one would know.”

“I want to go back,” he said.

I started to pedal again. I reached into the waves and mimicked strokes I’d learned once with a canoe paddle. I strained at the pedals. Benny helped. We got the boat turned back towards shore. We pedaled and pedaled but the beach didn’t seem to get any closer. The rain fell harder. Drops slid into my open mouth, slipped over my forehead into my eyes. They were salty from my skin and the ocean. I slitted my eyes and did my best to see.

“I told you we were too far out.”

“We’re not. How are we supposed to escape if we don’t go far out?”

He didn’t answer. I kept pedaling and he did too.

“I want my duck,” he said.

I’d forgotten I was holding it. The plastic was slick like a bar of soap. “This?” I held it up between finger and thumb.

“It’s mine,” Benny said.

I stuck it behind my back. “What you want it so bad for?”

“It’s mine,” he said again. “I want it back.”

I held it up, just out of Benny’s reach. “I’ve got it right here,” I said. “You want it?”

Benny stood up. He lurched on the wet plastic and the boat rocked. I steadied the boat. I looked up at him. I held the duck in my hand. My heartbeat sounded in my ears and I could feel a smile growing on my face. He started to climb over the divider but the boat rocked again and he almost fell. “Come on, Benny,” I said to him.

He stood up again. He was tiny in the boat, the divider coming up almost to his waist. The rain fell harder, sleeting in a thousand pinpicks. My hair spread like seaweed over my cheeks and shoulders, the sand washing out and salt taking its place. Benny came towards me but he’d grown even smaller, so small I didn’t see him. I didn’t see the duck, either. I could feel the boat rock and tip and sway and I held on but it was no use. I was in the water. Dark spread around me, and Benny, and the boat on the ocean. The water was cold, and I was numb.

The Coast Guard brought me back. Found me dangling on the side of the boat, crying. I’ve cried a lot since then. They picked me up and they said I said, “ducky, get it, the ducky I’m sorry” over and over. When they asked me if anyone else was in the boat, I shook my head.

Aunt Tara picked me up after the paramedics came. They said I would be fine. She brought me back to her house. My parents wanted me home but she said I wasn’t fit to fly. I lay in bed. Sweat on my skin, wet sheets, sleep, nothing. Aunt Tara put food in my room. Sometimes I ate it. I kept my mind a blank. But in a few days there were voices, thoughts, all clamoring in my head. Finally, I stood up. They fell back away.

My legs shook but I put my hand on the wall so I wouldn’t fall, and I walked downstairs. I only wanted water from the kitchen. But my aunt sat at the window in the front room. Without thinking I went and kneeled in front of her. I held onto the feet of the chair and tears burned at the corners of my eyes. The room wasn’t lit. Neither she nor I spoke and the room got darker.

“Tell me what happened,” she said, finally. Her words were slow and precise. I shifted back to my heels but kept looking down. I shook my head.

“I don’t remember.”

She was silent. Aunt Tara’s cane stretched across the floor in front of the chair. Every grain shone perfect and preserved in the polished wood, grayscale in the dimness. I shivered and looked up. She stared towards the window so I looked, too. Her face glowed in the dirty glass of the window, a blurred reflection. In the warped surface it was almost her, but everything different, like the time when my friends and I stole a couple cases of Mike’s Hard and drank them down like we’d always drunk lemonade, and giggled when everything started to shift.

“He tripped,” I said, words coming to me. “He tripped and hit his head and he fell.”

Aunt Tara nodded.

“I tried. I jumped in after him. I couldn’t save him.” It hurt to talk. “I held him,” I said. “He was too heavy. He fell in.”

I couldn’t swallow so I stopped talking. I thought she was watching me but when I looked she still was watching window. Minutes passed. Then Aunt Tara turned towards me. Slowly, she shook her head. She stared at me, her small eye growing bigger until it was symmetrical in her face. The wrinkles on her left side pulled taught. I saw the whites of her eyes and my chest stopped moving, stopped pulling in air—I couldn’t breathe.

Finally, she looked away. My chest released and I drew in a breath then followed her gaze to the window. Lights sparkled at the corners of my eyes, white static in my vision. My sight shifted; I could see outside, now. I saw how the sky was lighter than the pavement. Everything was grey, moonlit. The beach wasn’t far—it would only take six minutes to get there. Wouldn’t even have to hurry.

Then everything shifted again. Rain blurred everything. The little plastic boat glowed in the landscape, the brightest color around. I had the duck, and Benny stood and asked for it. Demanded it. I was going to hand it to him but it was so slick. I teased him, holding it over the boat, and then it dropped. Benny saw it drop. He dived in after it. Hit his head coming back up—I could feel the thunk of his head on the boat. I couldn’t see him so I dived in. Couldn’t see anything in the rain, but I got a hold of him. He wasn’t supposed to be heavy. He was always so little. When my arm went numb, when my legs stopped working, when everything was frozen—he fell below the water. I caught hold of the boat and held on. I didn’t want to fall down deeper. I was afraid. Then I was numb. At some point, the Coast Guard came.

On the floor of her house, I looked at my aunt and moved my fingers. Even after a week, they’d still felt empty. I felt empty. “I didn’t mean to do it,” I said.

But Aunt Tara shook her head. She didn’t speak. Her face was stern and her mouth twisted down. A cloud moved and moonlight glanced out from behind slatted clouds. Light lay across the floor in slanted bars of light. It broke the light filling my head. I reached out, clutched the chair in which Aunt Tara sat.

The floor rocked like I was still in the boat. I cried out and spread my fingers on the carpet, trying to hold on. Benny reached out, asking for the duck. I laughed at him, at how small he looked. I knew I could do anything I wanted. Knew Benny couldn’t stop me. I laughed and then reached back, and even as he yelled, demanded his duck back, I reached up and then I flung the duck as far as I could.

Benny stared at me. His mouth opened—not in surprise, but in anger—to yell. He climbed over me, punching and kicking and then he jumped into the ocean. He swam out far, looking for his duck.

“Come back, Benny,” I yelled. But he kept going, cutting through the waves like a small pale sickle. But then I couldn’t see the spray from his kicks anymore. I barely saw his arms flashing above the waves.

I yelled at him again and in a minute he stopped moving. He splashed as he moved forward or stayed in one place—I didn’t know if it was him or the boat that was moving. I saw his arms start to move again. It took a long time but he got bigger and bigger and then he was there. Just a foot away. He treaded water, panting. He opened his mouth and reached up an arm.

“Help?” His face was so pale.

I stuck out an arm. “Here,” I said. “Grab me.”

He pulled. The plastic was slick and the boat already tilted. Even as I tried to hang on he pulled me down. I screamed. “What did you do?” I asked, or tried, but there was water in my mouth, in my throat and I choked on it. He didn’t say anything. Just grabbed onto my waist as I clung to the boat. “You can’t do that!” I said. He was dragging me down.

But he didn’t say anything. Just hung on. It got harder to hold on to the boat—I was holding up two of us and my arms were so tired. The plastic so slippery.

When his grip started to weaken I could do nothing. Could only gasp against the side of the boat. The rain fell around us and mixed with my tears as my biceps strained. Then suddenly, the load was less. I clung to the boat and didn’t look down as he fell deeper in the ocean.

No, I said. My mouth hadn’t moved. “No,” I said again, out loud, to Tara. “No. No!”
She had stood sentinel over me and I lay on the carpet after it all, arms outstretched.  She looked back out the window. Light moved across her face. Her mouth pulled down and showed briefly, a slash in the darkness.

“No,” I said, but it was only a keen. I wrapped my arms around my knees and felt the breath go out of me with the sound.

I went home the next day. Bought a ticket. Took a taxi to the bus station and left, and didn’t look out the windows until I’d gotten home. Only my mother was still there. It didn’t matter, anymore. I didn’t talk to either of them. Wouldn’t. It was easier to think about, though, then the rest of it. Think about how that went wrong. About when the fights started, and why. What made them fall apart, after having me, and all those years together. Maybe they never should have gotten married in the first place. Wonder when they figured that out.

I thought about how in their wedding pictures, they looked happy. How in the one they framed, my father cups my mother’s elbow and wears a proud smile, like he’s just won a trophy. My mother cocks her hip just enough to have it brush his thigh, and looks up at him like she couldn’t wait for the rest of her life.

I thought about the pictures to block out the other memories. But when I closed my eyes they played on my eyelids like a movie, as clear as though it were the day before. Sometimes all I could see was Aunt Tara.

Even now, hiding in my room in my own house, I can feel her touch. Like a scar, burning, throbbing, ancient. When my eyes come open and I gasp for breath, trying again to think only of my parents, to think of nothing on the beach, my hand burns. Nothing can stop it. Nothing makes it go away.

Over, and over I see how Aunt Tara leaned over. She reached out with a claw, and touched my hand.